[MD] In and out of intellect.

[skutvik at online.no]

Hello Christoffer. 

2 Dec. you cited Ron's (for me):

> > ?The Quality concept" Arete",
> > as you stated above was replaced by SOM. Following this statement
> > you post: "The intellectual "carbon" that built the MOQ is the
> > Quality Idea and this is intellectual and will remain intellectual"
> > First you say Quality or Arete is social and is replaced by SOM the
> > (intellectual level?)then you say Quality is an intellectual
> > pattern. I ask, which is it? is Quality social or intellectual??

(I will answer Ron in due time) 
 
> The " Arete" Pirsig talks about in ZMM must indeed be a social level
> value - it seems Pirsig talks about it as though it was more similar
> to The Tao or something along that line, but it seems far more likely
> that what the sophists talked about when they said rhetoric was the
> only way of judging people and "truth" etc and the " Arete"  talked
> about is things valued by the social level.

Happy to see you and that we agree here. It's strange that Pirsig 
refused to "review" ZAMM in a MOQ light, your seeing the Aretê-
Quality in that book as more like Tao is something I agree with and a 
harmonization making it into social value may have looked damaging 
to Pirsig, but it's only damaging  for orthodoxy while most consistent 
with the SOL interpretation.  
 
> Indeed the sophists activity was probably motivated by a mix of social
> values and intellectual ones - but "Truth" as we know it had not been
> established as a firm concept yet, so it was mixed up. Then enters
> Socrates and the Western World is born. Literally. Slow birth-process
> perhaps. But still.

As I understand things the term "Aretê" was a household concept in 
Greece, it was Valor for warriors , Beauty for the arts ... etc. and as 
Pirsig says in ZAMM became equal to Truth for the coming SOM. That 
book's claim is that they (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) usurped general 
goodness to serve a new purpose, and THAT is after all the very idea, 
only that SOM was no evil but a new static level ... intellect. 

Regarding the Sophists. According to ZAMM SOM emerged as the 
Cosmologist (concrete) camp winning over the "Nous" (Abstract) camp 
in the early search for eternal principles. These early thinker had no 
notion of any subject/object - even less our mind/matter - content in 
their deliberations, but what would become the objectivists won out 
and as their opponents were the Sophists they necessarily became the 
subjectivists ...whatever their motives were at that time..          

> Just passing by

Stop by now and then.

Bodvar